Andi Taylor: destroyer of networks

I arrived at work this morning to be greeted by the store manager: "The network's down, and it's just us. I'm waiting a call back from I.T.".
Not a great start. I.T. say they can't even ping our router (which is actually property of BT) so we're kinda stuffed, as our own technicians can't touch it.
Needless to say, my office below was offline too. Which really means I can't do anything... All my files are stored on a remote network drive, so I had pretty much nothing. Pants.

I was spending the morning with one of the bosses to help him with a presentation and do some Excel crunching, but we couldn't do this in my office, so I ragged his MkV Golf TDi over to the Redhill branch (managed 3 wheels off the ground at one jump...) to try and work with him on his laptop out of there.

Wasn't very productive, but got some done, and at least I could access the network drive and send myself a big email of files so I could get them from home.

Spent the afternoon at home finishing Newsletters, publishing them on the Intranet (which is my own server, so I can get to it, of course!) and any other work I could manage via Webmail.

Notice just before 6pm that Caterham has returned online and apparently the problem with something in my office! Both PCs were off, so I was struggling to see how, but apparently the engineer (who I pestered earlier to try and escalate as originally it wouldn't be fixed for 24 hrs) unplugged my 3com Switch and the rest of the network came back online!?
If someone could explain how an inactive switch (as no PCs were on that were connected to it) could knock out another switch, and a Cisco router, I'd be interested to know!